Virtual Office Configuration

 

1/19/2006
Eric Low

Virtual Office (VO) is a silly little feature of Netware that brings all sorts of stuff to one easy page - NetStorage, ipp, email, virtual teams, eDirectory, and personal pages. How exciting! I didn't think we would ever use this. Nonetheless, here is my fight with the VO Configuration:

 

Some of the configuration for VO must be done through iManager. I could not see the VO configuration in my left-hand iManager menu, however. After looking around a bit, I discovered that for some reason the VO plugin for iManager wasn't installed, even though I had installed VO with my initial Netware installation! Nonetheless, I needed to get that plugin installed and working.

The required plugin is a Novell Plug-in Modules (NPM), located at SYS:/tomcat\4\webapps\vo\packages\VirtualOffice.npm, at the Novell Download site, or on the Netware Products CD (this did not exist on my NW6.5 SP5 Product Overlay CD). According to the iManager 2.5 manual, "Novell Plug-in Modules (NPMs) are archives that contain the files for plug-ins to iManager. When you install an NPM using the Module Installation task, you are installing a plug-in to iManager to add to its functionary[sic]."

Following this document (and also this one, which is a much newer guide to iManager module installation), I logged into iManager and clicked the Configure button (the icon with the little dude sitting at the desk) up at the top. I then clicked on Module Installation -> Installed Novell Plug-in Modules and checked the list for Virtual Office. Nothing! So, I clicked Module Installation ->Available Novell Plug-in Modules from the left-hand menu (which showed that there were no available modules), then clicked New. I browsed to the plugin module file that I mentioned above, then clicked OK. The website just sat there! I went back to the "Available Plug-in Modules" List, however, and suddenly VirtualOffice.npm was displayed. I checked the boxt next to it, then clicked Install. It said, "The system encountered an unknown error. Please contact Novell Support." I looked at the details, and looked like a bunch of Java errors. Could it be because I forgot to restart Tomcat? Or, was it because this NPM was only meant to work with iManager 2.0??

I went over to my Netware Console and typed TC4STOP. I waited a minute, then typed TOMCAT4 to restart. I then restarted Apache by typing AP2WEBDN, waiting a minute, and typing AP2WEBUP. I tried installing the available module again, but got the same error!

I looked closer, and discovered that this may not even be the module that I want. There exists a SYS:/tomcat\4\webapps\vo\packages\Administration.npm file, so I tried that one. This one installed without a hitch! I restarted the web server just like it told me to (by typing TC4STOP, AP2WEBDN, AP2WEBUP, TOMCAT4), then went into iManager. That module was now in the list of Installed Modules, however, I still could not see a menu option for VO under RBS! I even tried rebooting the server, just in case there was something that needed to be restarted which I hadn't thought of. Still nothing!

Just for the heck of it, however, I punched https://server.ip/vo/admin into my web browser, and it ended up taking me to something called "Virtual Office Portal Administration," at https://server.ip/vo/servlet/portal. Perhaps this is the VO admin page? According to what I read, the iManager plugin is actually VirtualOffice.npm, the module that I never got installed correctly!

In fact, at this point, the plug-in "installation" had screwed something up in Apache/Tomcat. I could no longer see my list of "Available Novell Plug-in Modules" (the window would display a System Error, the details of which were mostly a whole lot of java errors). I needed to manually remove the plug-in. I figured out what files were installed by the .npm file by opening it with a zip program. That's right, a NPM is simply a ZIP file in disguise. I needed to manually remove all the files that it installed, but holy crap, were there a lot of them! Instead, I simply removed virtualoffice.npm (and a virtualoffice1.npm that existed as well) from SYS:/tomcat\4\webapps\nps\packages, restarted tomcat and apache, and voila! I was now able to see the installed modules again. Phew!

*** As it turned out, if I log into VO with our server's admin account, an Administration menu appears on the bottom left. Perhaps this includes all the configuration that can be done through iManager. In fact, I'm sure that this Administration Menu is the result of having installed that Administration.npm.

 

First (and only, so far) thing I did through through the Administration menu was to set the email server options. I put in our exchange server URL and set the IMAP/SMTP server. I then logged out, and logged back into VO with a normal user. The initial screen, where it wants you to check your email info, had the correct server filled in. I entered the mailbox, password and email address (which were different from my Netware login), then clicked Save. It brought me to my email and showed me the most recent five messages, so that appeared to be working. I checked my inbox on the email server, and those messages were also still there, which means that VO did not download them (meaning it was either using Exchange or IMAP, or was using POP3 and not deleting them from the server. This is what I wanted.).

 

 

Setting the Team File Store location

One thing that you may want to set is the Team File Store location. Here is a good document describing how. When teams upload/share files, they are put in this location, which defaults to SYS:\tomcat\4\webapps\vo\WEB-INF\communityStore in OES Netware or SYS:\tomcat\4\webapps\nps\WEB-INF\communityStore in NW65 (pre-OES). If you go to Administration -> Environment when this is still set to the default, the Team file share will show as "none: Using default local filestore." Note that I have not enabled CIFS on our server! Therefore, the Team File Store must be configured without it.

I chose to move this for two reasons - one, that it is taking up room on the SYS volume, and two, that I wanted to make it more accessible in the file system (so that if I needed to do anything administrative with the files, I wouldn't have to look up the location!). I created a subdirectory off of root, on another of our volumes, called VOTeamFileStore and set an IRF that allowed no rights to be inherited (not that it mattered, since it was off of the root dir, but just in case). I then logged into VO with our admin account, clicked on Administration -> Environment, clicked on Team file share -> Edit, and entered owl:\VOTeamFileStore as the Team File Share. I left in the default user, defaultStoreUser and did not type a password, then clicked OK.

I logged in with another user, created a team, and uploaded a file. Voila, stuff appeared in the VOTeamFileStore directory that I had set!

 

*** FYI: Virtual Office appears to not be included in SP5, apparently pending the fix of some bug. If you want to install VO with an initial installation, you must install from SP4 and then upgrade to SP5. Also, if you're looking for the NPM's for VO or what not, you probably want to look on the SP4 Product Overlay CD.

 

 

Users can access Virtual Office through the web by going to https://server.ip/vo.